Very excited about this book! Conway’s Game of Life is what got me out of blubberism almost three decades ago as I implemented it in php and started looking into more succinct implementations which brought me to #apl, #lisp and so #forth.
I am building a many core #Forth computer on FPGAs using open source tools. It will run on boards with an FPGA, two USB ports, an RP2040 to drive the HDMI port, Flash and Hyperram.
I rewrote the stack functions to use my SM rather than a simple array. I had to write SM memory word and byte access routines and implement a stack pointer. Next, I need to deal with the return stack. I think I want to factor out the stack memory stuff so it’s reusable.
http://collapseos.org/ is pretty cool, I need to get better at #Forth. This space of simple, low requirements computing is super interesting to me, do you know any more resources? Also some that are hardware based?
I want to see absolutely no sensible and practical advice here. What programming language should I start vaguely and in a chill way teaching myself if I just want to experience something fun or elegant or interesting in and of itself, assuming I have no goal for using it to do anything really (outside of learning)
I think I’ll spend this afternoon working on FORTH and playing with PICO-8 a bit. I’d really like to have Picotron on a Raspberry Pi, however. Hm. Maybe I should write an OS…
I used to own a stack of boxes of vintage Byte magazine issues from 78-82 as I wanted physical copies of the #smalltalk and #lisp articles (which at the time were not scanned/available). Anyway I couldn’t help but read almost all of them, mainly for the ads! Also some great #forth articles. Ultimately it was incredibly informative to learn about the hype cycle of tech. So every time I hear about crypto or LLM shit I imagine it (well what ever the aphantasia version of imagining is) in terms of half page glossy over produced vintage byte magazine ads.
I’ve read “Starting FORTH” by Leo Brodie multiple times. He dropped implementation throughout the text, if you are willing to look for it. It’s approachable and understandable. He wrote on multiple levels at the same time. Beginner and implementor. Brilliant.
Time for some lunch and free-writing. I spent the morning cleaning up and refactoring the FORTH implementation. I even figured out how to talk to the GPIO pins on the RaspberryPi. Of course, I’m cheating a bit since I’m not using assembler, but it works.
Hm. I need to track recursive depth in my FORTH. I wrote a recursive Fibonacci word and blew Python’s recursive limit of 1000, as well as my FORTH’s max int. But the code works.